While the HD 4800 Series is rumored to feature GPGPU physics and HDMI 7.1 surround sound pass-through, today we were made privy of one concrete aspect of the new cards: the onboard memory. Qimonda contacted DailyTech earlier this morning with the news that they will supply AMD with GDDR5 memory chips for the reinvigorated Radeon family.

"The days of monolithic mega-chips are gone. Being first to market with GDDR in our next-generation architecture, AMD is able to deliver incredible performance using more cost-effective GPUs," remarked Rick Bergman, AMD Senior Vice President and General Manager, Graphics Product Group. "AMD believes that GDDR5 is the optimal way to drive performance gains while being mindful of power consumption. We’re excited about the potential GDDR5 brings to the table for innovative game development and even more exciting game play."

The high-speed memory chips are 512Mbit and offer bandwidth of up to 4.0Gbps. In preparing for AMD's June launch, mass production of the new GDDR5 chips has already commenced and are shipping in volume.

"We are very proud to supply AMD with GDDR5 volume shipments only six months after first product samples have been delivered," said Robert Feurle, Qimonda AG's Vice President of the DRAM Business Unit. "This is a further milestone in our successful GDDR5 roadmap and underlines our predominant position as innovator and leader in the graphics DRAM market."

"Qimonda's strong GDDR5 roadmap convinced us to choose them as a primary technology partner for our GDDR5 GPU launch," added AMD's Joe Macri. "Both the early availability of first samples and volume shipments added great value to the development and launch of our upcoming high-performance GPU."

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Except your forgot one of the biggest bottlenecks with IGP solutions is their dependency on system ram. The 780G can alternately use on-board GDDR instead of system memory. So the guy is essentially correct.

Sheesh man, its only been on the market for about 30 days. Sorry they disappointed you so much and haven't released every conceivable combination of options for the board yet. Seems like it would be a little understandable that those models would be a little behind the release date given its been standard to hijack system memory for the last decade of IGP solutions.

You have ALWAYS learned to walk standing upright... everything from the ground goes through your feet. Now start walking like an ape. Now you have even more sets of feelings coming in and you have to figure out what is from where and organize it. However we have our brains do the work... they have to program it to know. So I am not surprised they havn't gotten it together in two months. So thus why I am holding out for the future.

Are you holding out because you KNOW that 780G supports GDDR or you just HOPE it supports GDDR? DDR2 support on the current mobos is not interesting, and it looks like GDDR on integrated video chips is out of the picture for the foreseeable future. Care to provide a link that proves the opposite?

Unlike Pirks and amanojaku who seem to want to be negative about faster memory, I think it would be great to get faster memory on motherboards. As is pointed out, think of what the upcoming 790GX chipset would be able to do with some 2GHz DDR on the board as direct access for the IGP. Or just having that kind of bandwidth for the entire system. IGP would truly catch up with stand alone cards of the same specs instantly.

Now, I understand that DDR (standard and not GDDR) probably has significant differences in terms of precision over GDDR, but I can't help but think that it would be great if the technologies were able to merge somewhat.

When I first looked at the motherboard in my HP Pavilion Pentium III 800 I noticed something interesting. There was nice empty lot that was reserved for a GPU and dedicated RAM for the GPU. Good performance from integrated graphics was a real possibility back in 1999/2000 but I wonder why they didn't solder on the TNT2 chip.

Now with the new lower power requirements of GDDR5 maybe we could see integrated graphics that won't suck so bad or suck up system RAM. We already have the low power consuming GPUs, and while they aren't high end, being able to play modern games could be nice option.

The ATI Radeon E2400 Discrete GPU has a compact 31mm x 31mm package design, with 128MB of on-package GDDR3 memory. This product is ideal for space constrained designs helps eliminate the need for potentially complicated on-PCB memory layout.The ATI Radeon E2400 MXM-II module has 256MB of GDDR3 memory and is based on the open standard MXM-II module specifications, which is ideal for low profile, space constrained environments, while providing the flexibility for an upgrade path.The core graphics technology takes advantage of the industry’s latest 65nm fabrication process, enabling design of a high performance yet low power product allowing it to fit into a variety of chassis minimizing the need for expensive cooling solutions.With AMD’s revolutionary Unified Shader Architecture, the ATI Radeon E2400 brings advanced Vertex and Pixel processing for embedded display solutions. This can assist customers develop richer, visually appealing content for their applications, with the confidence that their graphics processing requirements can be met for the entire product lifecycle.

It depends on the board. The 780G does support GDDR however it is based on what the manufacturer wants to add it or not. The chipset supports GDDR. However as I posted earlier, it takes a motherboard maker new sets to get the chipset to understand to use the GDDR instead of the system DDR. Thus no current MB supports it. However, they do have embedded GPU's that use true GDDR3 as the post above mentions. However it is different then the normal motherboard, AMD is working on getting a board where you just choose the chip, select how much GDDR you want your GPU to have and its all one board. No PCI slots needed thus you can use a smaller case... think of a carPC able to push HD the box fits in the glove compartment or in the dash where the CD player goes, then have the WiFi built in and you have a mobile command station.

So you are right, they do not have GDDR included with the motherboard, but it does support it, we are just waiting for the manufacturers to get it working properly.

DDR2 memory (Not GDDR2) has been available on budget Graphics cards for some time now, There used to be Graphics Cards in the Early 1990's where you could actually add more or even upgrade the memory for more performance. (Most notable on the S3 Virge cards).Then you used to have the good old Intel boards which actually had a Ram Slot dedicated to the Video card once you flipped a jumper.

Well I can't wait to get one of these, I've had 2 R600 for awhile now since I can't believe I even considered getting an nVidia card. No offense but I've always liked ATI more. So I hope they can raise my morale this time around. Because gaming performance wasn't at it's best, but on synthetic benchmarks it did very, very well, which in the end mean nothing if you can't play games at a decent frame rate.

I also run two R600's at the moment. I bought them back in the fall, before G92 and RV670, on special for around 300$ each, which was good value back then. I have to say that they put out very nice framerates on everything except Crysis, where putting that money in NV's directly could've netted me maybe 10-25% higher frames. Still, I do not regret the price I paid for the performance I am getting.

The GDDR5 chips have a bandwidth of 4Gbps, the DDR3 module has a bandwidth of 12.8GB/s

According to Hynix the industry's first 1 Gib GDDR5 memory supports a bandwidth of 20 GB/s on a 32-bit bus, which enables memory configurations of 1 GiB at 160 GB/s with only 8 circuits on a 256-bit bus.